Reading Nature
Winning the West
By TOM MURPHY

Review of: Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. The Journals of Lewis and Clark.  (Washington: National Geographic, 2002.) Abridged and Edited by Anthony Brandt.

Even though there are maps and guides and it’s been done many times before, floating down Pine Creek is always an adventure. That’s true not only because the journey is beautiful, but also because moving water has a will of its own that demands skill and respect from the person moving with it. Somewhere on the bottom of Pine Creek, probably lodged between some rocks, is a pair of my glasses; as my kayak gracefully rolled over, it was the paddle or the glasses, and at the time the paddle seemed more important.

When I read Lewis and Clark’s journals, I remember my Pine Creek experiences, and it is hard to conceive of what the Corps of Discovery did, taking off into the unknown, paddling and sailing their way up the Missouri, and, after crossing the Rocky Mountains, down the Columbia River and back. They took off into what was, for every United States citizen, the unknown. They managed to find Native-American guides but their information was sometimes good, sometimes limited because Lewis and Clark moved through land occupied by more than forty different tribes. None of them knew the whole picture.

The edition I am recommending, edited by Anthony Brandt, is abridged: though I don’t generally like abridgements, the two explorers between them wrote about a million words during the two-year, four-month trip. This edition also cleans up the spelling and sentence structure. Clark was a very bad speller, and Lewis had some problems too, and their sentences are often twisted, even for eighteenth-century writing. Of course, they were writing under the worst circumstances and they intended to edit it for publication but never did. Some readers think fixing the spelling takes away some of the charm of the journals, and though I, too, like to read things in their original form ( I make students read Chaucer in the original Middle English), in this case, Brandt’s help makes it much easier to focus on their story.

And the change in the language does not obscure the excitement. We can still follow Lewis as he discovers that some of the information he was given about what came to be called the grizzly bear was not accurate. On April 13, 1805, when they had not yet seen one, Lewis notes that, “This animal is said more frequently to attack a man on meeting with him, than to flee from him.” Four days later he records that while they have seen many bear tracks, they “have seen but very few of them, and those are at a great distance generally running from us . . . ; the Indian account does not correspond with our experience so far.” On May 5, they kill one with some difficulty: they put five balls through the lungs and five more in other places. Wounded, the bear swam to a sandbar halfway across the river and hung on for twenty minutes before dying. He was over eight feet long. By May 11, Lewis, with more experience,  admits “these bears being so hard to die rather intimidates us all.”

Because of what I do for a living, I think often about the relationship between nature and the written word. Sometimes they seem almost like opposites: Do I stay inside and read or write about nature or do I get up and go out and experience it directly? What the journals of Lewis and Clark suggest is that writing about nature can transform the experience. As Anthony Brandt says of Lewis and Clark, “Not only did they make the extraordinary trip, they reported it to the world in striking, unforgettable detail. Before them the American West was all fantasy and conjecture; after them, it was known.”

Tom Murphy teaches nature writing at Mansfield University. You can contact him at readingnature@mountainhomemag.com.